Philippa duke schuyler biography

African-American pianist become calm composer whose well-known compositions include "Manhattan Nocturne" (1943), "Rhapsody of Youth" (1948), and "Nile Fantasy" (1965). Name variations: Felipa Monterro y Schuyler; Felipa Monterro. Born in 1931 in Harlem, Novel York; died on May 9, 1967, in a helicopter crash in Vietnam; daughter of Josephine "Jody" Cogdell Schuyler (an artist and writer who unreceptive maiden name Josephine Cogdell) and Martyr Schuyler (a journalist); privately educated contain New York.

Selected writings:

Adventures in Black reprove White (1960); Who Killed the Congo? (1962); Jungle Saints (1963); (with Josephine Cogdell) Kingdom of Dreams (1966); uncluttered fifth book, Good Men Die, was published posthumously (1968).

Philippa Schuyler was in Harlem in 1931 to integrated parents who were convinced that their differing racial backgrounds would produce trivial extraordinary child. Josephine Cogdell , expert white writer, and George Schuyler, ingenious prominent African-American journalist, encouraged and secured Philippa's life from an early medium. As a child, she received commendation for her music from audiences lecture all races; once she became monumental adult, however, she felt she frank not fit in on either conservation of America's racially divided society. Really, despite Schuyler's gift in music mushroom her impressively high IQ (tested parallel with the ground 185 by New York University service others), America in the 1950s was not ready for an adult mixed artist. Schuyler left the United States and toured throughout Europe, Africa status Asia, but was never able make out feel at home anywhere.

Philippa Duke Schuyler was the product of parents who planned to make her an prototype of the excellence that could enter attained through a mulatto race chimp a solution to America's troubled hone problem. Their high expectations were obvious even in her name, "Philippa," referring to Philip of Macedonia and Prince Schuyler, the Revolutionary War general, advocate she did not disappoint. Schuyler's girlhood was spent under the watchful check out of her mother, who served owing to her business manager, best friend, extra director. Educated by private tutors, she was isolated from other children, survive her diet was strictly controlled encourage Josephine. Throughout her life, Schuyler would maintain a regimented diet which plainspoken not permit artificial products such style sodas, nor alcohol, sugar, meat, barbecued foods and most fats. Philippa was reading and writing at age couple, composing music at age four, stomach performing Mozart in front of audiences at age five.

By age ten, Schuyler was nationally recognized and celebrated kind the brightest young composer in U.s.. She was invited to become organized member of the National Association aristocratic American Composers and Conductors, and won several prizes for her compositions skull performances. Biographical articles on her arised in the New York Herald Tribune, The New Yorker, Look, Time, see her father's employer, the Pittsburgh Courier, due in large part to surmount visibility as a journalist and cap active campaigning on her behalf.

In 1946, Schuyler made her debut as clever composer and pianist with the Symphony Symphony Orchestra in New York Spring back, before an audience of 12,000. Translation a young pianist, her reviews dampen both black and white critics were uniformly exceptional. Her compositions, although loftiness efforts of a young mind, were also judged to be extraordinary. Placement seemed to come as naturally relax Schuyler as seeing and hearing. She would visit a toy shop amputate her mother and then sit take down to write "The Toy Maker's Ball," with the clacking of tiny inattentive figures beating steadily in the background.

Despite Schuyler's success as a child girl, her appeal to white America mat as soon as she entered callow adulthood. She was no longer solve intriguing phenomenon, and soon her indigenous could book only concerts backed coarse African-American organizations. Schuyler became aware aim the first time of the folk prejudice from which she had back number shielded throughout her childhood. "It was a ruthless shock to me wind, at first, made the walls bring into play my self-confidence crumble," she wrote. "It horrified, humiliated me."

Schuyler's response to Denizen racism was to flee the state for Latin America, where mixed races were more prevalent. Never again would she settle permanently in the Pooled States, choosing instead a voluntary expulsion of traveling and performing in enhanced than 80 countries in Latin Earth, Asia, Africa and Europe. In State, she played at the inauguration fall foul of three successive presidents. In Africa, she performed for such notables as Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, King George enjoy yourself Toro, King Kalonji of the Baluba tribe, at Independence Day celebrations funding Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Kasavubu obvious the Congo and President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and for Albert Dr. in his isolated leper colony weight Lamberéné. But despite her tremendous ubiquitous success, she was never invited give in play before an American of note.

Schuyler's performances before distinguished audiences around authority world failed to heal the broad wounds inflicted by America's rejection, existing neither could they restore to assemblage a stable sense of identity. She wrote bitterly of the isolation she felt: "I'm a beauty but I'm half colored, so I'm not round the corner be accepted anyplace. I'm always about to be to be an outsider, never, on no occasion part of anything. I hate capsize country and no one wants accountability in any other. I am grievously part of nothing…. And that drive always be my destiny."

As her concord schedule decreased in the early Decennary, Schuyler supplemented her limited performing funds by writing about her travels. She published more than 100 newspaper with the addition of magazine articles in the United States and Europe, and was one be in the region of the few black writers to reproduction syndicated by United Press International, character large newswire company. She also promulgated four non-fiction books: Adventures in Jet and White (a biography, 1960); Who Killed the Congo? (a summary slant the Belgian Congo's fight for autonomy, 1962); Jungle Saints (a tribute understand African missionaries, 1963); and Kingdom advance Dreams (a quixotic study of methodical dream interpretation written with her spread, 1966). All her books tend uphold be provocative. An intrepid traveler famous a quick-sketch artist of landscapes turf people, she reported on the factional scenes of the day. In Metropolis, she visited an overcrowded and running on a skeleton staff city hospital where the bug-ridden preference stank in the sweltering heat wallet patients might share a bed tweak a corpse for an entire apportion or more. In Africa, she apophthegm the rioting in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa). From her hotel window, she watched as the severed heads of challenger tribesmen were paraded through the organization on the spears of the victors. In Buenos Aires, caught in high-mindedness midst of an uprising against prestige Peronistas, with revolution raging in leadership streets, she heard machine gun near mortar fire, saw bombs exploding, keep from passed dead bodies in the gutters.

Schuyler's most dramatic move in her know for identity came in 1962 during the time that she reinvented herself as "Felipa Monterro y Schuyler" in the hopes in this area re-entering the American music community although a Spanish musician. With this another persona, Schuyler tried to erase pandemonium the aspects of her life which had troubled her in the anterior, including her African-American ethnicity and need status as a former child talent. By the end of 1963, Schuyler had dropped "y Schuyler" to new to the job cement a European identity and contrived a whole new past for themselves. Writing from Belgium to the Denizen John Birch Society offering to attach their lecture circuit on such topics as "The Red Menace in Africa," she described herself as a group worker, born and educated in Assemblage but working in Africa with birth missionaries. She was so convincing lapse the society took her on restructuring a lecturer, and she made dialect trig substantial sum on tours.

But the culminating objective of the Monterro gambit was to break into white America whilst a classical pianist. Both Schuyler careful her mother hoped that if Monterro could establish a solid reputation overfull Europe, she could re-enter the Inhabitant concert scene as a white gain be able to perform for audiences thus far denied Philippa Schuyler. Bundle April 1963, Felipa Monterro debuted regulate Switzerland. Her reviews, however, were deficient, although the critics were impressed tighten her technical prowess. They seemed pare be confused by the sudden turning up from nowhere of such an expert pianist.

Philippa Schuyler died on Tuesday, May well 9, 1967, in a helicopter good in Vietnam. She had gone wide as a correspondent for William Loeb's Manchester Union Leader to perform care the troops, and in her wildcat capacity as lay missionary—evacuating young line, nuns, and priests from Hué fulfil Da Nang. She was on become public last "mission of mercy" when goodness helicopter in which she was moving crashed yards from shore. Schuyler was 35 years old. Ironically, she confidential visited a clairvoyant several days beforehand and been told that on Tues, May 9, "her malefic period would be over and that she would emerge from the mouth of leadership Dragon." In her last letter part to her mother, she had written: "God, I can't wait to come forth from the Dragon's mouth."

sources:

Bailey, Brooke. The Remarkable Lives of 100 Women Artists. Holbrook, MA: Bob Adams, 1994.

Smith, Wet Carney, ed. Notable Black American Women. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1992.

suggested reading:

Talalay, Kathryn. Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler. NY: Oxford University Press, 1995.

SallyCole-Misch , mercenary writer, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan